ENG 11 Honors

 Maine  New Hampshire  Vermont  Massachusetts  Connecticut  Rhode Island  New York  Pennsylvania  New Jersey  Maryland  Delaware

 Diverse landscape  Ports and harbors  Seafood  Seafaring / Entry  Hospitable, friendly people  Kind of…  Rich history  Birth of America

 Often:  Bleak  Gothic  Religious  Full of imagery  Focuses on the sensory  People are much like the landscape

ENG 11 Honors

 Born Edith Jones into an upper-class New York City family in  Privately educated by governesses and tutors, both at home and abroad.  At an early age she displayed a marked interest in writing and literature, a pursuit her socially ambitious mother attempted to discourage.  Her husband did not appreciate her writing, embezzled money from her to spend on another woman, and was abusive and mentally unstable.

 According to Claudia Roth Pierpont of The New Yorker magazine, Wharton’s marriage was “a disaster: intellectually, emotionally, and above all sexually.”  She writes that “after what seems to have been one or two attempts at grappling with their mysterious bodies, Teddy and Edith lived together in celibacy for twenty-eight years.”  They finally divorced in 1913, when divorce became more socially acceptable.

 Wharton was advised by her doctor to take up writing fiction more seriously in order to relieve tension and stress.  Wharton found temporary solace in her surreptitious affair with the journalist Morton Fullerton, which coincided with the collapse of her marriage.  It was in the wake of this affair and her ensuing divorce that Wharton wrote many of her most successful and endearing works.

 Ethan Frome (1911) is one of the few pieces of Wharton’s fiction that does not take place in an urban, upper-class setting.  Interestingly, Wharton based the narrative of the novel on an accident that occurred in Lenox, Massachusetts.  She traveled there extensively and had come into contact with one of the victims of the accident.

 Wharton found the notion of the tragic sledding crash to be irresistible as a potential extended metaphor for the wrongdoings of a secret love affair.  Extended metaphor: one where there is a single main subject to which additional subjects and metaphors are applied.  Example: All the world's a stage and men and women merely players.

 According to Pierpont, Wharton believed this novella “marked her coming-of-age as a craftsman.”  Novella: a written, fictional, prose narrative normally longer than a short story but shorter than a novel.  Examples: o Jack London's The Call of the Wild o John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men o George Orwell's Animal Farm o Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange o Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's o Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

 When Ethan Frome was published in 1911, some reviewers and readers were skeptical that Wharton could write realistically about poor farmers.  Wharton responded that she wanted to show life as it really was in the poor villages of New England.  She felt that many other writers had romanticized the poverty and toil that people in these towns faced.